Unless otherwise indicated herein, approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims listed below and are not admitted as prior art by inclusion in this section.
There are various well-developed and well-defined cellular communications technologies in telecommunications that enable wireless communications using mobile terminals, or user equipment (UE). For example, the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) is a well-defined and commonly used communications system, which uses time division multiple access (TDMA) technology, which is a multiplex access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, video, data, and signaling information (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile phones and cell sites. The CDMA2000 is a hybrid mobile communications 2.5G/3G (generation) technology standard that uses code division multiple access (CDMA) technology. The UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is a 3G mobile communications system, which provides an enhanced range of multimedia services over the GSM system. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE), as well as its derivatives such as LTE-Advanced and LTE-Advanced Pro, is a standard for high-speed wireless communication for mobile phones and data terminals.
For data transmission in mobile communications, transmission control protocol (TCP) is the predominant transport layer protocol. The performance of TCP packet transmission may depend on various system parameters. For example, one dominant parameter is the round-trip transmit time (RTT). The TCP transmission throughput is inversely proportional to the RTT. An intuitive way to increase the TCP transmission throughput is to reduce the TCP RTT. A good mechanism to improve TCP RTT is to reduce the delay of TCP acknowledgement (ACK) in both the transmitter and the receiver endpoints. However, the protocol architecture in LTE is not beneficial for reducing TCP ACK delay and tends to be proprietary in nature and does not appear to scale well for high data rates communication systems. This issue will become more serious and need to be overcame for the newly developed New Radio (NR) or 5th Generation (5G) communication system supposed to support high data rates transmission.
Accordingly, it is important to properly reduce TCP RTT to boost TCP transmission throughput for high data rates transmission. Therefore, in developing future communication system, it is needed to provide proper mechanism for improving packet transmission between the transmitters and the receivers.